Factor or Fiction Weather Edition

There’s a chill in the air, the trees are bare, and your fields are resting. Winter has crested, and your planning is in full swing. But what does 2023 have in store for us? Is it really snowing less than it used to? Is winter truly the most predictable season? And will La Niña stick around for the fourth year in a row? What’s a fact, and what’s fiction?

Winter is actually the least predictable season, due to the “waviness” in the atmosphere. Yes, you read that right – the atmosphere is full of literal waves, created by the differential heating effect of the sun. These imbalances in pressure and temperature essentially “carry” the weather by driving weather patterns around the globe. Think of it like the waves in the ocean — one wave affects all of the water around it, pushing and pulling other waves towards or away from the shore. In the winter, we see a much wavier system with the tendency to fluctuate much more often and react more drastically. So, while we may be able to see a storm coming or a front moving in, it’s difficult to predict exactly how intensely or when these things will reach us. This on top of the more rapidly changing conditions makes for some pretty unpredictable months.

Last year saw us through the first “triple dip” (lasting for 3 consecutive years) La Niña of the 21st century and overall was a pretty classic year. And while it seems this will continue through the beginning of 2023, it’s likely we will shift into an ENSO-neutral pattern by the end of spring. A full ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) cycle contains La Niña and El Niño as the two extreme ends of the cycle, with a “neutral” stage in between. As we trend further toward an El Niño year, we can expect increasingly less predictable conditions in the growing regions.

We know El Niño is coming, but we can’t be sure when. It could be here as soon as June 1 or perhaps as late as November 1. 2023 is shaping up to be a transitional year from La Niña to El Niño. What will that mean for our farmers, particularly as we look at the growing season? Since this is a transitional year, answering that can be a bit tricky. But it could be a colder start to the season and a warmer and drier than usual end to the season. The easiest prediction is to say this summer likely won’t see extremes one way or the other. Depending on when El Niño hits, it could very well be an average year.

So what will the coming El Niño mean for farmers in Canada? It’s hard to predict right now since we're not out of La Niña yet and we’re probably not going to be fully into El Niño by the time summer starts. But as we head into summer, we should have a much clearer picture of implications going forward and what to expect in the latter half of the year. We can say that any impacts will be of a lesser extent in Eastern Canada and the Maritimes, where the North Atlantic Oscillation plays a larger role.

As always, it’s important to keep in mind that things are never perfectly typical or predictable, and we will continue to do our best to provide you with the most up-to-date information as we enter into this year. From all of us at FieldView, happy planting!